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The Roadmap for Adobe LCDS 3

I had a dream. I had a dream that Adobe’s CTO gave me a call saying, “Yakov, can you help us with writing a roadmap for LiveCycle Data Services for 2010?”
I said, “Piece of cake, Kevin. Just give me a half an hour”. This is what I came out with.

1. Give a serious bonus to software engineers who created Fiber, a set of goodies behind model-driven development. Way to go!

2. Fire that guy who already reached his level of incompetency and said, “If one salesman can sell LCDS licenses for $20K a CPU, everyone can do it”. This guy is simply killing the product by making it unreachable for lots and lots of corporate clients. Change your state of mind from “these filthy rich Wall Street client should pay” to “each RIA project manager has limited budget”. BTW, have you heard of recession that we are still in? Remember, when Adobe purchased Macromedia and changed the Flex pricing policy from $15K per server to $700 per IDE people actually started using the product? Why not trying the old trick again?

3. Charge LCDS evangelists with changing their main message from “Look Ma, No Hands” to “Unleash the superpower of RTMP and custom adapters”. Today, they are preaching to the wrong crowd. Flex enthusiasts who don’t know Java and are developing cool Web sites for their cousins’ video stores won’t be buying LCDS licenses no matter how high you jump. They’ll be happy to use the new Modeler in Flash Builder 4 as a cookie cutter, with free LCDS express edition.

4. Invest more money in QA to ensure that Fiber’s code generators are not just well written, but are of superb quality. It’s great that you’ve eliminated the need to write Java and configure destinations on the server – people who are not capable of learning Java will applaud you. But generating the in-memory-only code and not giving developers a chance to debug it (if something goes wrong in the generated code) requires top notch quality code interpreter and code generators. In the 90th, I’ve had excellent experience with PowerBuilder (Sybase) that did a great job in this department where everything worked as the doctor ordered. But I also had bad experience with BEA System’s Java Workbench IDE that at some point started giving null pointers in the code that was not written by me and was not accessible by debugger.

5. Usually, enterprise Flex/LCDS developers have to work with existing persistence layers. In Java world, Hibernate and EJB dominate there. Fiber also uses Hibernate in the model-driven development workflow. But what if developers are not allowed to work with DBMS directly and have to use a pre-existing Hibernate layer? It’s not clear how Fiber will use an existing Hibernate configuration vs. generating a new one.

6. Ensure that enterprise RIA architects are familiar with such advantages of LCDS over BlazeDS as duplex-by-nature RTMP, reliable messaging, and throttling. BTW, did I mention that you need to lower the price of the enterprise LCDS license to $5K a CPU?

7. Start promoting the importance of the load testing on early phases of any RIA project and explain how to use of the new LCDS Java NIO testing tool. Use the lose-weight selling strategy: show the picture of a Flex/LCDS application Before and After.

9. Allow your Flex evangelists publicly admit that even though developer can use MVC Flex frameworks even with Model-driven workflow where the application is generated automatically, it doesn’t bring much value. Really.

10. Ask LCDS evangelists to create a reference implementation of the popular among Java developers Pet Store. Get the existing version over here and do a facelift using Flex and LCDS 3. But make it real including the coverage of all little details that Java EE developers want to know (i.e. how to integrate the new application with existing authentication/authorization service like SiteMinder).

“Wow, Yakov, you came up with a really nice laundry list! What do I owe you?”
“Kevin, if you still have some money left after acquiring Omniture, please send a case of Louis XIII cognac my way. But if you are still recovering, I understand. A case of Cardenal Mendoza is just fine”.

4 thoughts on “The Roadmap for Adobe LCDS 3 ”

Working as an enterprise flex architect, rather than Adobe provide a LCDS Load testing tool, I would rather see them provide a ready made application that demonstrates all available protocol combinations ( AMF, RTMP, HTTP, Messaging / Secure, Unsecure / NIO, Non-NIO, etc. ) but whose flex client gets the list of services dynamically from the services-config.xml file, so I can use that file to hone down to the specific protocols I want test data for. Then,make it easy to hook into that application using common enterprise load testing tools like NeoLoad and LoadRunner.

Here at my client’s site, they have standardized on Load Runner and it has been a royal pain having to put something together that will give accurate results in their environment, between having to get ports opened in the appzone firewall for NIO and RTMP to work properly, getting the application (using messaging) to work properly in a Weblogic/BigIP load balanced environment, where it all has to work with Load Runner ( HP can’t even seem to help much with figuring out what their application needs from the Load Testing application to get proper results! ). If Adobe could ease THIS pain, I would be a very happy man.

Unfortunately, the LCDS express edition evaporated into thin air, leaving those of us who were using it high and dry. The departmental version for up to 100 users also evaporated… I don’t know how they can justify such blatant disregard for those of us who have been developing for the platform for years, depending on the affordable licenses to be available long term.